Merdeka MacFest

Sat, 25 Aug 2007
Hoxe's Bookstore & Cafe, Damansara Perdana
8:00 - 11:00pm

Report : Azul Adnan
Photos : Azul Adnan, Zainul Firdaus

Because it was a mere few days to Malaysia's 50th birthday, this 'Fest was called the Merdeka MacFest. And there were plenty of goodies to give away to mark this special occasion.

Faiq started the night rolling with his presentation on portable applications. These are apps which you can install on thumb drives and use on multiple machines. The advantage is you'll always be carrying your, e.g. browser, preferences with you. A lot of these apps can be downloaded from Freesmug. Amongst the apps that Faiq demonstrated were Adium, Audacity and Firefox.

The second presenters were Vern and Anna who talked about Ubuntu. Vern started off by going through how to install Ubuntu on the Mac, showing how additional selected files can be easily downloaded from the Net. He also showed how to configure custom keyboard shortcuts and demonstrated Ubuntu's Deskbar which is equivalent to Spotlight.

Next Anna showed Compiz within Ubuntu, a cool 3D graphics compositing window manager. It was incredibly easy to create multiple desktops, dragging windows within desktops and setting transparency levels, amongst other stuff. Compiz isn't resource hungry and thus provided fast graphics display.

Anna also showed how tons of free apps come readily available with Ubuntu, everything you would need without spending a single sen. E.g. Gimp (alternative to Photoshop) and OpenOffice (alternative to Microsoft Office).

As a brief intermission I showed some TV ads compiled from around the world. These included some funny ones from Thailand for those feeling faint.

The last presentation for the night, made by Jinny, was on audio transcription. She started off by recording a short interview with me using her Sony digital voice recorder. Then she transferred the audio clip to her Mac and used Transcriva to transcribe the text from the interview. Transcriva's features include automatically determining the speakers, controlling the playback speed and auto-rewinding a few seconds every time the audio clip is stopped. It exports the finished transcription as an RTF or TXT file.

Jinny also demonstrated TextMate which she uses for editing her transcriptions.

The goodies given away included Ubuntu CDs and stickers courtesy of Vern and Anna and five CDs containing the trial version of iWork '08 as well as BootCamp 1.2, kindly compiled and burnt by Wei.

The lucky draw prizes consisted of four books and official Apple merchandise including T-shirts, keychains, pen/pencil sets and beanies, specially donated by Apple.

Before we dispersed for our roti telur and ice drinks at the nearby Nasi Kandar restaurant we took some group shots including the all-important "Merdeka!" pose.